1. Technical Field
The present teaching relates generally to methods and system for process and data sharing. Specifically, the present teaching relates to methods and system for accessing an application residing in a foreign system environment.
2. Discussion of Technical Background
In medical imaging, patient data are often processed by one or more dedicated clinical Data Processing and Analysis Application (DPAA) systems. Due to the fact that DPAAs may reside in a system environment different from where the patient data are reviewed such dedicated clinical DPAAs may be accessed from a Data Manipulation System (DMS) residing in an environment where the patient data are reviewed, which is different from that of the DPAAs. For example, a Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) system (a DPAA) that identifies lung lesions in CT data and a Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CADx) system (another DPAA) that analyzes hepatic lesions and the liver in CT data may reside in a system that is different from a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) environment which is a routine reading environment where a physician stores and review the CT data of a patient. As such, in order to use the CAD system and the CADx system to analyze the CT data of the patient, the CAD system and the CADx system have to be accessed from the PACS environment, which is different from the environment where the CT data are read. In this case, a physician needs to invoke the CAD/CADx applications in his/her working environment to perform needed analysis on the same patient data and to use the CAD/CADx system's interactive tools to review the CAD/CADx analysis results.
Currently there are mainly three types of solutions to allow a physician to utilize an application residing in a different system environment. One type is to transport the result from the processing generated by the DPAAs in a static format such as Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) that is recognizable both by DPAA and the DMS system where the physician operates. In this manner, the DPAA runs on its own system based on the same data and then packs the result in a format that can be used in the other environment. With this solution, only the processing results are displayed in the DMS environment and such results are static. The DPAA's interactive data manipulation tools can not be accessed in the DMS environment where a physician is working. As such, it is not possible for the physician to interactively utilize the DPAA's in the DMS environment to perform data manipulation and analysis as needed.
The second type of solution is to integrate the DPAAs, such as a CAD system, with the DMS, such as a PACS, through some mutually defined APIs. With this solution, implementing the API-based integration requires code-level engineering effort, which is not only time consuming but also cost prohibitive. For example, considering the complexity of CAD systems and PACS systems on today's market, the effort to achieve such API-based integration can be very costly. This kind of integration is especially difficult if one considers integration with systems already installed in a clinical environment. Other dedicated clinical applications, such as 3D visualization, have similar restrictions in their accessibility within another independent system.